The state's salmon industry
has struggled with lower prices and lost customers in recent
years because of competition from foreign, farm-raised salmon,
and that struggle continues, said Gunnar Knapp, a University
of Alaska Anchorage economist.

Some pockets of Alaska's complex
salmon fisheries are strengthening, with fishermen receiving
higher prices for their catches.

And while the overall value
of Alaska's salmon harvest has nearly doubled since the industry
hit bottom in 2002, the comeback is modest when measured against
the boom years of the late 1980s and early '90s, when the farming
industry took off, Knapp said.

On Thursday, the state Department
of Fish and Game issued its summary of this year's commercial
salmon season. At $309 million, the dockside payoff for the catch
was above the $279 million average seen during 1996-2005, but
this year's tally is $25 million less than fishermen received
last year. A major reason was the size of the catch, which at
142 million fish was 80 million fewer than the record catch in
2005.

Knapp said major new trends
are sweeping Alaska's salmon industry:

- Much sockeye - the main money
fish among the five salmon species Alaska fishermen harvest commercially
- used to go to Japan in frozen form. Since the mid-1990s, however,
there's been a dramatic decline in exports of frozen sockeye
to Japan as buyers there have turned to farmed fish.

- More sockeye and other types
of wild Alaska salmon are moving into the European and U.S. markets,
in part because the flood of cheap farmed fish has helped turn
health-conscious Americans on to eating salmon. It's possible
negative publicity about environmental and health concerns with
farmed salmon have whetted appetites for Alaska's wild salmon,
but another factor is that salmon sellers these days are finding
an advantage in the U.S. market compared to the stagnant Japanese
market.

"Basically, fish are attracted
to money," said Bob Waldrop, a former fish-processing company
executive now working as a consultant.

- Historically, pink salmon
- the most abundant but least valuable kind of salmon, pound
for pound - went into cans. But recently, more pinks as well
as another low-value species, chum salmon, are being frozen for
export to countries such as China, which has low labor costs.
There, the Alaska fish is thawed and reprocessed into value-added
items such as stuffed fillets or salmon croquettes, which are
then re-exported back to the United States for sale.

Knapp said he's "cautiously
optimistic" about the outlook for Alaska's salmon industry
overall.

"I'm quite optimistic
for those parts of the wild salmon industry able to produce a
high-quality product and focused on marketing," he said.